Frederick the Great and Other 18th-C Characters, Discussion Post 31

[cahn]

And in this post:

-luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!

-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, and selenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!

-mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War

(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)

-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D

Comments

Re: Voltaire and Charles XII

[cahn]

Incidentally, when Suhm is telling Fritz about a "life of Charles XII" that he's recently read, in Christmas 1732, in "With You, There's a Heaven," that was meant to be Voltaire's, which had just come out the year before.

Ha, excellent. I feel like you might have told me this in beta but since I had no idea who Charles XII was and knew a lot less about Voltaire than I do now, the information didn't really stick at all :P

ahhhhhh now I feel like I should take a stab at Voltaire's Charles XII, now that I'm going to be finding out who he is :D

And why the rule was parliamentary at all: that started right at the end of the Great Northern War, because everyone was fed up with the recently deceased Charles XII and his twenty-one-year war that ended disastrously for Sweden. They told his successors that they could be monarchs, but they had to give up absolute power. (There was precedent for this in Sweden, but Charles XII and his father had ruled absolutely for the last 40 or so years.)

Oh, okay, interesting, yeah, I can see why everyone was like "dude, Ulrike, don't mess with this."